mornings after
by insomniajax
Summary: An unplanned pregnancy tends to disrupt the normal course of life. But for Jotaro, there's been no "normal" since Egypt.
1. Chapter One

Chapter One

* * *

_This work contains major spoilers for Part 3: Stardust Crusaders. Content warnings can be found at the bottom of each chapter._

* * *

Jotaro Kujo has never set foot in a florist's shop before, but he guesses he's seen enough _Days of our Lives_ to know what to expect.

He remembers how the episodes used to air on Tuesday evenings, how he dozed in the old leather armchair while his mother did the ironing, sighing at how wonderful it was that the brooding private investigator also had a romantic side. "Look at him picking out those flowers for his sweetheart," she'd say, beaming appreciatively, "and he even wrote her a little card, did you see, Jotaro?"

She always made a point of things like that, especially near the end of his senior year, when he still hadn't brought a girl home.

...

He pushes open the door to the shop and a bell tinkles above his head. He hadn't planned on going out today, still tired from last night's swim.

Since Egypt he's settled into a routine. His days are spent in class, brooding over seabird colonies and macrophytes and linear regression. Nights are spent at the campus's aquatic center. He swims laps until they close, midnight Monday through Friday. Afterward he smokes in the bathroom.

Jotaro wanders the shop for a few minutes, running his fingers through the wilted daffodils in the window. Nothing looks too impressive. The shop itself is dimly lit and scattered with lackluster bunches of flowers. Petals and pieces of dried leaves litter the scuffed linoleum floor.

What he enjoys most about swimming, he decides, is its unvarying monotony. The vacuum-sealed silence of deep water. Three strokes, breathe to the left. Three strokes, right. Repeat. It's a simple mantra. Repeat until your muscles burn and your lungs are on fire, until the chlorine inflaming your eyes and nose drags you to the surface gasping.

...

He runs his thumb over a shiny brass bell at the counter, turning up an index card that says _please ring for service_. On the reverse, a hand-drawn daisy grins crookedly. The words out for lunch! are scrawled inside a fat, cartoonish speech bubble.

"I'm here," she calls out from the back room. "Just a second." _Julia._

There's a sense of thoughtless assurance about her, a calm coolness behind her gaze. She has sparkling dark eyes and sharp features, and her reddish hair is pulled into a loose knot at the nape of her neck.

She's wearing a flowing, sea-green smock today, but despite this he still notices the soft swell of her belly.

...

"How have you been holding up?" she asks, clutching her wallet as she closes the door behind her. "I know this is stressful."

Jotaro mumbles something in response, shoves his hands in his pockets. "You're still up for coffee after this?" It sounds more cavalier than he wanted.

He nearly offers her a cigarette on the bus over, but stops himself in time and fakes a coughing fit instead.

It's true that he doesn't have much memories of "fatherly behavior" to draw on, he muses. _Unless you count leaving your family behind to tour the country with a fucking saxophone._

"For what it's worth," Julia says quietly, "you seem like a decent person. Not every guy would have stayed."

_He remembers one Fathers' Day back in elementary school, how they baked clay beer mugs in the midday sun before brushing on a thick, shining glaze. He'd managed to knock his mug from the windowsill, but the teacher just swept up the pieces and sent him to play outside with the other children. No one mentioned it after that. _

"They should." He pulls the cap over his face and closes his eyes, crossing his arms behind his head. "Wake me up when we get there, okay?"

...

* * *

_Content warning: Pregnancy mention  
_


	2. Chapter Two

Chapter Two

* * *

_This work contains major spoilers for Part 3: Stardust Crusaders. Content warnings can be found at the bottom of each chapter._

* * *

He hasn't slept more than four hours last night. Eventually familiar dreams draw him in despite the noise of the bus, tracing themselves on the inside of his eyelids.

__Julia stands perfectly still on the edge of the diving platform, twenty feet up, wearing a black bathing suit and matching rubber cap. Her dark eyes narrow as she looks down at him for the first time. He wonders if she's lost her nerve, frightened by the view from above, but then she smiles. In line behind her, a kid shifts his weight impatiently, and she dives. Excellent form, barely a splash. __

Maybe they're not dreams at all, he thinks absently, maybe he's just replaying random scenarios in his mind and all he has to do is open his eyes, it can't be that hard, can it—

...

__They've left the house party together, and now they're lying under a blanket in the tall, damp grass of the nearest park. He realizes that he's probably drunk after all, but it's too dark to go anywhere else. They talk about swimming and university plans and family, but he doesn't want to say too much—"yeah, I killed a vampire two years ago by punching him in the leg"—so instead he reaches up her back and slowly unclasps the catch of her bra.__

__...__

He should really wake up, he tells himself, just open your eyes, for fuck's sake. He hears the old man's voice in his head, half-jokingly ranting about how selfish he is for staying in bed all day: "__so you can go all the way to Egypt but you can't take out the garbage?"__ and, alternatively,_ "___you can't coddle him like this, Holly, he's not a boy anymore"—__and gradually their voices fade out, their bodies dissolving like sand sculptures at low tide—

...

_"—___he's a man!" the old man says approvingly, looking up at him from the ambulance's gurney. "Now, that's not to say that we couldn't have used a helicopter or two just now, eh? Eh, Jotaro?"__

_"___Sure," he mutters under his breath. As if there weren't enough dead civilians already.__

__He supposes, watching the medic shine a penlight into his grandfather's eyes, that the Speedwagon Foundation's people don't count as civilians. They signed up for this, they must have had some idea of what Dio and his followers were capable of.__

__Jotaro tells himself this all the way to the hospital, trying to block out the rattling of tubes and vials and foreign-looking instruments. Trying not to look at the old man laid out on the gurney, freshly back from the dead and cracking terrible jokes with the medics. He'd half-expected Dio to lurch upright at that point, shrug off the white plasticized sheet and join in their banter. __

_"___Ah, Mr. Joestar," the medic asks him, as if he's just remembered, "do you have any other injuries we need to pass on to the hospital before transfer? Anything we've missed?"__

__They keep calling him that. "It's __Kujo,_" ___he says flatly, "Just—make sure my heart is fine."__

__Through the ambulance's back window, he can see that they're wheeling a stretcher through the hospital doors, its occupant covered with a black tarp. The tip of one foot protrudes slightly—one white sock, no shoe, green slacks.__

__...__

Someone's shaking his shoulder. Julia, he realizes. She presses his cap into his hand. "This fell off while you were sleeping."

"Thanks," he mumbles. He wonders if he talks in his sleep. Polnareff did, at the beginning of their trip at least, but it was mostly French and asking about it felt wrong, anyway.

"It's almost our stop."

"Thanks."

...

* * *

_Content warnings: Alcohol consumption, sexual activity, medical procedures, major character death.  
_


	3. Chapter Three

Chapter Three

* * *

__This work contains major spoilers for Part 3: Stardust Crusaders. Content warnings can be found at the bottom of each chapter.__

* * *

He opens the door to the darkened exam room and sees Julia lying prone on the table, draped from the waist up in a blue paper gown. An elderly, white-coated technician sits on a swiveling stool beside her. "Congratulations," she says quietly, moving the slender wand over Julia's abdomen. "You must be the father—" Her tone is probing, questioning, and he senses the hard edge of unease beneath the polite veneer.

Julia raises her head and waves him over, her face flushed.

"Look," she says in hushed tones, pointing at the black-and-white display, "this spot here, that's their heart."

He traces the path of her finger across the monitor. To him it feels like the uncharted landscape of a new planet, like watching through the dark unblinking eye of a distant satellite. Abstract, nameless, vaguely foreign.

...

Jotaro feels a headache coming on as they ride the bus back to his apartment together, feels the familiar pressure rising behind his eye sockets and at the corners of his jaw. Afterwards he takes a hot shower, towel-dries his hair and retreats to his room, muttering something about needing 'time to think' and that he'll be out soon.

He settles into bed and flicks on the television, settling on a nature documentary with Japanese subtitles. It reminds him of something he would have watched as a kid, and he probably had at some point.

Jotaro closes his eyes and folds his arms behind his head, letting the narrator's detached, worldly monologue slowly sink in.

"The noble Alaskan bull moose has long been prized by hunters," the narrator says solemnly, over an aerial shot of a sweeping evergreen forest. "A single carcass yields up to seven hundred pounds of meat. As seasoned hunters say, 'never kill a moose more than a mile from a vehicle of some sort.'"

__Solid life advice,__ he thinks. __That's the kind you pass on to your kids.__

Snap out of it, he tells himself sharply, getting up to turn off the TV.

In a way he's relieved that Julia leaves him alone. He wonders if she can hear the TV from outside. __She must think I'm crazy. Not even the old man watches this stuff, and he's basically senile.__

Jotaro can't stop thinking about the narrator's voice. Something about it seems familiar—worldly, pompous, detached. __Cairo again__, he realises, __that damn hospital, __and then it all comes back at once.

...

__Behind a plastic curtain, the silver-haired Arabic doctor gives him a shot of painkiller and tells him to lie still as he examines his injuries. "What a cruel man," he says absently, switching on a large light over the bed and angling it downwards. The lower half of his face is hidden by a surgical mask. His accent is American. "One knife would have been plenty."__

__The constant chatter was a welcome distraction at first, since he wasn't expected to say anything back.__

But does the guy _ever_ shut up?

_"___Of course," the doctor says airily, snipping a line of suture thread, "we're impressed with the quality of the specimens we were able to obtain, both from Mr. Joestar and the—the body. Quite unconventional, what you did back there, but if it works, it works. Ever thought about a science career after all this is over? They say you're still a student."__

_"___You're talking about Dio's blood." He closes his eyes and tries to ignore the dull, persistent tugging at his skin. __

_"___That's right. We wanted to do a full post-mortem at first," the man goes on, adjusting the light above the bed, "tissue, bone, brain samples, all of that. Mr. Joestar was against it from the beginning." He huffs a long-suffering sigh, drops a metal instrument onto a tray beside the bed and picks up another. "There's no hard feelings, of course. It's all a matter of perspective, really fascinating."__

Bastard,__he thinks ruefully, too exhausted to respond. __This isn't a damn case study.__His eyes keep closing, and eventually he stops trying to fight it.__

__In his fragmented, distant dreams he walks the Pacific seafloor and feels no fear. Each footstep stirs up clouds of black silt, while the seawater filling his lungs has replaced the taste of his own blood.__

__...__

"Jotaro—"

He feels the mattress shift as Julia sits down beside him, the curve of her hip against his bare thigh. She puts her hand on his shoulder, nestles her chin into the hollow of his neck. "I know it's a lot to take in." Her breath is cool against his cheek, minty-fresh.

"It's fine," he sighs, lacing an arm around her neck. "Come here." __She didn't ask for this.__

For a while he forgets.

...

* * *

_Content warnings: Medical procedures, pregnancy discussion._


	4. Chapter Four

Chapter Four

* * *

_This work contains major spoilers for Part 3: Stardust Crusaders. Content warnings can be found at the end of each chapter._

* * *

At some point after the doctor's visit, Julia moves into his apartment. __It's__ __inevitable,__ he tells himself, but for once he doesn't mind.

Jotaro teaches her to swear in Japanese, brings home glossy National Geographics from the campus bookstore, kisses her in a haze of Aqua Net and Love's Baby Soft.

__It won't last,__ he thinks at night, jolted awake by feverish dreams that fade too slowly.

He's still not sure which parts of his life to omit and which to lie about.

...

Jotaro comes back to their apartment after his evening swim, rubbing his wet hair with a towel. He nudges the door open with his foot, sees her jacket lying in a heap in the entrance.

"Julia?"

He's taken aback to find her sobbing in the bathroom, leaning over the sink with her blouse unbuttoned and her dark hair falling down her back in a tangled mass. Pastel-smudged tissues litter the counter.

"Hey," he says quietly, coming up behind her and wrapping her in a towel as she trembles. He rests his chin on her head and they linger there in silence, his arms cradling the still-unfamiliar weight of her swollen belly. "What happened?" There is another question beneath his words, a sick unspoken dread.

She swallows hard, chews her lip. Their eyes meet in the mirror's fogged reflection. "I'm fine," she says quickly, "it's just my brother."

"Roy?" He vaguely recalls the name, the same bitter twist of her lips when she said __he's eccentric.__

"I thought coffee would be okay," she says slowly, "he suggested it, and we hadn't talked in a while. He seemed fine on the phone. I didn't even think to tell you."

Her tone is different now, falsely airy. It means __laugh it off,__ it means __I've already forgotten, honest, __it means __don't kill him, come to bed.__

__...__

"You know," she sighs after an uneasy silence, "he's the kind of jealous guy you see in sitcoms. Old-fashioned. I thought he knew I was pregnant, but it turns out Mom never told him." She dabs at her ruined mascara. "He didn't take it too well, the bastard."

Jotaro gets the rest of the story from her as they lie in bed that night. He nods in all the right places and strokes her hair, pausing to deliver such insights as "families are complicated".

He lies awake until morning, watches stars blink in the distant glazed darkness.

...

* * *

_Content warnings: None apply._


	5. Chapter Five

Chapter Five

* * *

_This work contains major spoilers for Part 3: Stardust Crusaders. Content warnings can be found at the bottom of each chapter._

* * *

Next morning, Julia tries her best to act as if nothing happened, humming quietly as she peels oranges over the sink. _I've already forgotten_, _honest._

...

Jotaro leaves the apartment alone that evening, walking slowly with his hands in his pockets. He takes the bus downtown, gets off early and walks the rest of the way to the shop, down side streets and through a narrow alley.

When he arrives, he takes a quick look around him, glancing briefly at the sign for _Roy's Salvage Garden_ in the shop window.

He reaches through the locked door with Star Platinum, flicks up the latch with one shimmering finger—_looks like they're open late today._

_ ..._

The shop is nothing special, dimly-lit and cluttered, the Beatles blaring away somewhere in the background. Jotaro feels as though he's walked into an abandoned museum—now he pushes away thoughts of D'Arby, that cabinet he'd filled with glassy-eyed, twitching puppets.

His eyes narrow and he taps into Star Platinum's heightened senses, a reflex as natural as breathing. Suddenly he's conscious of everything from the cockroach skittering along the linoleum to the low hum of the space heater at his feet. Paranoid, he knows, but he isn't taking any chances.

He watches Roy emerge from the back room, a tall, lanky redhead wearing a beat-up bomber jacket. Jotaro puts him somewhere in his early thirties. _Jealous guy,_ she'd said. _Bastard._

The man's dark eyes are keen and alert as he looks Jotaro up and down, raises a quizzical eyebrow. "Hey, buddy, what can I do ya for?"

It's the smug, sneering familiarity that finally tips the balance.

"Try again." His voice is distant in his ears, detached and cool.

"What—"

"Like you talk to your sister. You remember, right? It starts off _you_ _little bitch—"_

Roy freezes where he stands. His face flushes, and his jaw quivers when he finally gets the words out."Get out," he snaps. "Get o_ut. _I'm callin' the cops."

At his silent command Star Platinum materializes behind him. Its hulking form looms over them both with folded arms, disdain etched into its chiseled features. _This guy can't even see it._

Whatever he's going to say is broken off by the blaring radio—_she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah—_and then Roy is scrabbling for something under the counterand there's a brief metallic glint in his hand.

...

Afterwards Jotaro switches off the shop's lights one by one, lets the music play itself out. Then there is only the man's wet shuddering gasps, and the dull crunch of broken glass under his cheek.

...

It's a reflex, he tells himself in the days that follow. His Stand was supposed to defend him. He had no control over it. That's what he tells the Speedwagon people, when they manage to spring him out of jail in the morning. _It's a reflex_, he insists, and all agree, telling him that he shouldn't blame himself, that they're paying for the man's medical bills, that they'll "pull some strings" to find Julia another job after their child is born.

This should reassure him, but there are some thoughts he still can't shake.

...

First: He still refuses to tell Julia what really happened, and he never will. He can never mention his Stand, the trip to Egypt, or killing Dio. He knows that they won't last together.

Second: Despite their research, the Foundation still isn't sure if Stand abilities are linked to a heritable gene. Jotaro's child may turn out like him, or may not. Regardless, it's a well-established fact that Stand users attract Stand users, so staying close is inherently risky.

Third: Roy was reaching under the counter that day for a knife.

...

* * *

_Content warnings: Verbal abuse (mentioned), canon-typical violence._


	6. Epilogue

Epilogue

Jotaro sits in the hospital cafeteria and tears open a sugar packet with his teeth. The coffee is greyish and bitter and he sips it slowly, mindlessly chewing on the styrofoam rim.

His eyes flicker from his watch to the clock on the wall. It's been almost five hours since he and Julia arrived at the maternity ward, time enough for three coffees and half a pack of cigarettes.

He needs to quit, he tells himself. It'll be bad for the kid. He'll toss out his last pack on the drive home, start chewing nicotine gum or something_. _

Somehow this thought makes him smile.


End file.
